18 ways to generate more B2B sales leads

21 February 2017 by
Otto Peura

Let’s face it, a crucial part of acquiring customers for your product or service is getting more people to know about it. No matter how good your product is, if no one knows about it, no one will buy it. This post will help you get whatever your B2B company is selling in front of as many people as possible and the strategies are guaranteed to help you generate new B2B sales leads.

You don’t have to have the best product. You don’t have to be the cheapest provider. You don’t even have to have the best service. To succeed, all you have to be is the best seller.

In order to sell effectively, you’ll need to constantly generate high-quality leads that you can convert to customers: leads that your salespeople can take, contact, meet and make sales with. This can even be fully automatic but your leads still need to be high quality.

Good online lead generation strategy generates more revenue.

Improved lead generation and revenue

If you can increase your volume of leads by 10% and the average quality of your leads doesn’t decrease you’ll make 10% more income. Simple and effective.

Each new email address (or phone number or address or company name) you’ll generate is worth something. They’ll probably all have different values on average. Maybe the email addresses that subscribe to your blog convert pretty well but email addresses you acquired through a competition won’t be so valuable.

That’s why it’s very important to take lead generation seriously. It’s one of the most important processes of your business and you should be constantly evaluating the effectiveness of all your lead generation tactics.

In fact, 85% of B2B marketers consider lead generation their #1 challenge.

Let’s look at 18 of the best lead generation ideas you can use to improve online lead generation for B2B companies. And remember, first thing you should do is to start using Leadfeeder, the sales tool for B2B companies.

1. Have good conversations as often as possible

Never rely only on one-directional communication such as website, blog posts, and videos. Try and have a real conversation with your prospects as often as possible.

If your user asks about a feature in chat don’t only offer a link to a knowledge base, offer a 10-minute call to walk them through. This will offer you yet another possibility to sell.

If you are emailing with your lead, offer a video call. If you are in a video call, offer to meet. Try and get closer to your leads every time you interact with them.

2. Use Twitter for lead generation

Twitter works for every business because it’s so big. The challenge is just to find the right people. After that, it’s all about engaging them, which can be as simple as following them or taking part in a conversation (as lead generation expert Dan Knowlton shows in this video tutorial).

You can use Twitter search to find people using relevant hashtags or keywords, or use LinkedIn to find interesting professionals. You can also use specialist tools such as Followerwonk or CrowdFire.

Using Twitter effectively for lead generation requires a significant amount of time but if done right it can yield great results.

3. Generate leads from your website visitors

Leadfeeder allows you to transfer website visitors to your CRM as leads

Tracking your website visitors on an account level is an important tactic that suits well with any other online lead generation strategy. If you are not yet tracking individual companies on your website, Leadfeeder has a free 14-day trial.

4. Use lead databases

Use with caution. When you are using a database someone else has built, you can never be sure of its quality. As I mentioned before, B2B lead generation is all about the quality of the leads.

If your business is new or you need a big bump to your lead volume, lead databases such as Unomy or Salesfinder can provide that extra source of leads you need.

LinkedIn can be considered a database in this sense, too. LinkedIn is almost an endless source of professionals from various fields. Surely some of them are interested in your products so go searching!

5. Use marketing automation

Are you already collecting email addresses? If not, you need to fix that as soon as possible.

When you have a source of new email addresses you can use marketing automation to nurture them and earn more data on your lead. Once they have progressed in their purchase cycle with your marketing automation, sales can pick them up.

Use data to segment your customers to send as relevant messages as possible. Never send the same materials to a new lead that you would send to your old customers.

6. Answer questions on Q&A services

Quora can be a great source of new sales leads. Your customers are already in Quora trying to solve the problems your service solves the best. If you go there to help them you’ll generate leads with a very positive attitude towards you.

We are using Quora for lead generation here at Leadfeeder too and it has proved to generate high-quality traffic to our website.

7. Leverage someone else’s audience

Justreachout.io helps you reach out to journalists and writers

Guest blogging can be a very powerful way to spread your message further. If you don’t yet have the biggest audience, someone else does and if you can provide them with good content, they’ll let you publish your post on their blog.

You can use tools such as Justreachout.io to find people with influence and contact them. You might even be able to outsource the whole task to freelancers so that someone ghostwrites an article for you and pitches it to blogs and other publications.

8. Chat with your users with live chat

Even though you’ve used precious time to try to ensure that all content on your website is relevant and all possible questions have been answered, some visitors just can’t find what they are looking for.

According to studies, 42% of customers prefer live chat for their customer support questions, while 73% of those who take part in a chat are happy with the results.

Most live chat tools collect email addresses, so again you can combine this tactic with tip #5 in this list.

9. Make full use of your emails

A well-designed signature can work as a lead generation tool

A good email signature with links to social media profiles can help your prospects easily find out more about your product.

You are probably already sending quite a lot of email from your personal email account. How many people do you have working at your company and how many emails do you think you send per day? When you consider those numbers it suddenly becomes clear how important your personal email signature is.

Include links in your email signature and use them to promote your content or link to your LinkedIn account. If someone clicks once out of every 20 emails you send, it’s already very useful given the amount of emails you probably send per year.

11. Experiment with different content formats

Are you writing blog content actively but you’ve never tried YouTube? You are losing leads. Some of your prospects like to read, some like to watch videos. You should be providing for all needs.

Use all possible channels to multiply your reach to generate leads from new channels. You can even consider translating your content to widen your reach.

12. Create lead magnets

A lead magnet is a free piece of content that is wanted by your customers.

Do you have special data, an internal tool that could be useful for someone else, too? Can you create something like that?

Creating something of high value and giving it for free is a great way to make friends. And friends are great leads!

This strategy is often called a lead magnet. Rosemary Brisco, managing partner of ToTheWeb gave a tip to use Upwork to create your lead magnets.

Upwork is a tool to find a freelancer for various tasks. Don’t expect miracles from there, either. Posting a good ad and selecting a well-equipped freelancer is a tedious task. If done correctly, Upwork can save a lot of time and money!

13. Promote customer referrals

Picture:CustomerThink

Leads generated through customer referrals are often very high-quality. Do you have a clear process on how you turn your happy customers into promoters?

Use NPS score or similar procedures to find out who’s the most probable to promote your tool and send them ideas on how they can spread the word. You’ll be amazed how often they do!

14. Generate more online reviews

Positive reviews increase the trustworthiness of any product or service.

87% of B2B decision-makers browse online before purchasing. They will try and find honest reviews to support their decisions. So to generate more leads you have to have reviews of your service/product available online.

But don’t even consider buying reviews. If you only have one customer, make sure they’ll review you. Honest reviews generate you leads. Dishonest reviews can kill your search engine rankings or do some other harm. Don’t risk it.

Make sure your prospects find favorable reviews. Again, you can use NPS to find the correct target group to ask for reviews.

15. Create laser-focused landing pages

If your customer is searching for online marketing specialist don’t let them land on a page about digital marketing.

Make sure you are serving all verticals with your landing pages and then optimize inside the verticals. Conversion optimization should be an ongoing project and #1 priority in all website renewals, too. Part of your SEO strategy is to make sure visitors land on a relevant page.

By the way, while you can use remarketing ads to get your visitors back to your landing pages, most of the times the conversion happens on the first page view. See this great research by Straight North that covers just that.

16. Try lead generation ads

Facebook lead ads can help you collecting email addresses for marketing automation

Facebook and Twitter both have lead generation ads that allow advertisers to collect email addresses inside the platform with no need to direct users outside of the social media.

The idea of the lead ads is that when it’s easier for users to share their email addresses, they’ll do so more often.

My experience of them, however, is not very good. It can increase your conversion rate a bit but your content has to work elsewhere, too. Lead ads are no magic bullet.

17. Increase website traffic with paid ads

Your website is probably already generating leads somehow and if you are following any of the tips here, you should have many reasons to increase your website traffic.

Increasing web traffic with paid ads is simple, but you don’t want just any visitors. Use time and effort to create campaigns that they generate sales leads and don’t just increase your web traffic.

Use Leadfeeder to see on a campaign level how well-suitable your website visitors are for you as sales leads and optimize further.

18. Make sure your SEO is in good shape

Google is doing search better and better every day. That’s why you should spend a lot more time crafting good content than trying to hack their algorithms and rank well with your bad content.

Still, it’s important to have some good backlinks and at least some kind of an understanding of what keywords are important. “Ranking higher in the SERP = more leads”, says Adam Gingery, DMi Partners.

By the way, guest blogging, mentioned before, can be one way to improve your SEO.